disease cancer -why we named it cancer?
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Around 400 B.C., Hippocrates is said to have named masses of cancerous cells karkinos — Greek for crab. Science and medical historian Howard Markel discusses a few hypotheses on why Hippocrates named the disease after a crab, and how well cancer was understood in the ancient world.
About 47 A.D., however, the Greco-Roman philosopher Celsus -he was not a doctor, but he wrote a very important encyclopedia of medicine - he named it cancer, because that's the Latin equivalent of crab and so the word remains to this day.
And also we called doctors to this day, oncologists. And that's another Hippocratic term onkos, is a Greek word, and it simply means masses. The - I think that's probably a lot better word than cancerologist.
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